This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Friday, November 30, 2007

In Hendrik Hertzberg's December 3, 2007 New Yorker profile of Republican candidate Mike Huckabee he quotes the candidate's stump speech on Education and Health Care. Huckabee is a former Southern Baptist clergyman - not given to the ten-second sound byte. He speaks calmly, in stories, parables, and extended metaphors.

On education, he talked not about standardized tests or back-to-basics but about something like their polar opposite. "We have to change and reform the education system so that we're capturing both the left and the right sides of the kid's brain," he said. "There ought to be a new focus not just in math and science—which there needs to be—but also a balanced focus on music and art and right-side-of-the-brain activities. Otherwise, we end up with an education system that's like a data download—a great database but no processor." On health, he skipped the usual denunciations of socialized medicine and noted, as Republicans seldom do, that "we spend so much more per capita than any other country on earth"—far more than second-place Switzerland. "The current system says, 'We won't pay a hundred and fifty dollars for the visit to the podiatrist, we'll wait until there's a thirty-thousand-dollar amputation and we'll cover that.' "

The Foreign Policy parable is as much about kids as the education one:

The foreign-policy section of his talk (what there was of it) was a leisurely account of how his children laugh at him when he tells them that his grade-school class used to "duck and cover" in fear of a Soviet nuclear attack. "Somehow, in our naïveté," he said, "we thought that if the world is coming to an end the crosshairs of the first nuclear missile would be aimed at the BrookwoodElementary School, in Hope, Arkansas." The section's conclusion—and the speech's only hint at how the speaker might deal with what he called "a very dangerous world"—was a single sentence: "I want to be the President that helps to make it so that your grandchildren laugh at you when you tell them you used to have to put your toothpaste in a plastic bag and take your shoes off to get on an airplane to go somewhere in this country."

None of this is to say that Huckabee's policy positions are much better than those of his Republican rivals; in some cases, they're worse.

He wants to replace the federal tax code with a gigantic, horribly regressive sales tax;

he cannot name a single time he has ever disagreed with the National Rifle Association;

he wants to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage and abortion.

In practice, however, the sales tax and the amendments would go nowhere, and he couldn't do much about abortion except appoint Scalia-like Justices to the Supreme Court—which his rivals have promised to do, too. God knows what his foreign policy would look like, but no one else does.

To all appearances, Huckabee's gentle rhetoric is a reflection of temperament, not a stylistic tactic. Arkansans caution that he is capable of churlishness. But his history suggests that he prefers consensus to confrontation, that he regards government as a tool for social betterment, and that he has little taste for war, cultural or otherwise. He seems to regard liberalism not as a moral evil, a mental disease, or a character flaw—merely as a political point of view he mostly disagrees with.

The good news is that Education is emerging not just as an issue to choose sides over ("We must save/discard No Child Left Behind at all costs!") but as a subject for discussion. Hear hear! - and thank you Roy Romer and ED in '08.- smf

Keep in mind that this study was written and created by a company - Standard & Poors/School Evaluation Services/SchoolMatters.com with a product to sell. They wrote the study, came up with the criteria and methodology, decided on what the outcome would be and went there.

They picked which apples to compare to which oranges on what basis.

There is nothing wrong with the input from an interested observer - I'm not disinterested — neither are you! but one must be critically (in the positive sense) aware of the observer's interest and intent - in this case packaging and selling the data and driving folks to their website. Can you say "Product Placement?"

The quality of the UN&WR/S&P/SchoolMatters data itself is suspect. Steve Barr of GreenDot reports that the posted info about his Amino Leadership High School in Inglewood (National #31) is incorrect - the school DOES collect Title One funds and admission is by lottery, NOT merit. The data posted on SchoolMatters.com for my daughter's school also appears to be incorrect.

No one should denigrate the accomplishments of the students and educators at any of the schools on the list. The schools at the top of the list take one's breath away - but the very top schools are highly selective institutions cherrypicking (or cherrypicked and teaching the high achieving and highly motivated. The book "School of Dreams" - about overachieving programs for overachieving students - was written about Gretchen Whitney High in Cerritos - School #12 on the list!

Schools like Eagle Rock, Granada Hills andCleveland jump off the page - yes, each has outstanding gifted education programs - but the majority of their students are neighborhood kids from the attendance area.- smf

Los Angeles County High Schools in the US News & World Report November 2007 listing of the "Best High Schools in America"- top 100 in US listed first (Gold Award) followed by Silver Award and Bronze Award. LAUSD schools in red.

Gold Medal

Top 100 schools nationally based on College Readiness Index

Silver Medal

all other schools with a college-readiness index of at least 20, but that are not in the top 100 nationally

Bronze Medal

either do not offer AP, or do not achieve a college readiness index of at least 20, but successfully meet other two key performance indicator criteria

The Ranking Formula

How we got from 18,790 public schools to the top 100

The 2008 U.S.News & World Report America's Best High Schools methodology, developed by School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor's, is based on the key principles that a great high school must serve all its students well, not just those who are bound for college, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes that show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.

We analyzed 18,790 public high schools in 40 states using data from the 2005-2006 school year. This is the total number of public high schools in each state that had grade 12 enrollment and sufficient data to analyze for the 2005-2006 school year. A three-step process determined the best high schools. The first two steps ensured that the schools serve all of their students well, using state proficiency standards as the measuring benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first two steps, a third step assessed the degree to which schools prepared students for college-level work.

College readiness. The first step determined whether each school's students were performing better than statistically expected for the average student in their state. We started by looking at reading and math test results for all students on each state's high school test. We then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantaged students (who tend to score lower) enrolled at the school to find which schools were performing better than their statistical expectations.

For those schools that made it past this first step, the second step determined whether the school's least-advantaged students (black, Hispanic, and low-income) were performing better than average for similar students in the state. We compared each school's math and reading proficiency rates for disadvantaged students with the statewide results for these disadvantaged student groups and then selected schools that were performing better than this state average.

Schools that made it through those first two steps became eligible to be judged nationally on the final step: college-readiness performance, using Advanced Placement data as the benchmark for success. (AP is a College Board program that offers college-level courses at high schools across the country.) This third step measured which schools produced the best college-level achievement for the highest percentages of their students. This was done by computing a "college readiness index" based on the weighted average of the AP participation rate (the number of 12th-grade students who took at least one AP test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th graders) along with how well the students did on those AP tests or quality-adjusted AP participation (the number of 12th-grade students who took and passed (received an AP score of 3 or higher) at least one AP test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th graders at that school). For the college readiness index, the quality-adjusted AP participation rates were weighted 75 percent in the calculation, and 25 percent of the weight was placed on the simple AP participation rate. Only schools that had values greater than 20 in their college readiness index scored high enough to meet this criterion for gold medal selection. The minimum of 20 was used since it represents what it would take to have a "critical mass" of students gaining access to college-level coursework.

The top 100 high schools nationwide with the highest college readiness index scores were ranked numerically (ties were broken using the average number of AP exams passed per test taker) and awarded gold medals. The next 405 top-performing high schools nationwide based on their college readiness index earned silver medals. An additional 1,086 high schools in 40 states that passed the first two steps were awarded bronze medals.

Why Some States (and D.C.) Weren't Included

Alabama, Alaska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C., were not included in the 2008 America's Best High Schools analysis because they did not make their 2005-2006 school-year state test data available. Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska were excluded because they provided insufficient 2005-2006 assessment data to complete the analysis.

Analysts from School Evaluation Services developed the methodology and compiled the analysis. At schoolmatters.com, SES provides one of the largest, most easily searchable collections of education data ever available.